Book Review: Stephen Winter. Monetary Redress for Abuse in State Care. Cambridge UP, 2022.
In his latest book, political scientist Stephen Winter offers an analysis of redress programmes intended to provide economic compensation for different forms of abuse to individuals who have been in institutional care or foster care, who are often called “care leavers” or “survivors” in the research literature. While monetary redress is part of a wider range of reparative measures, including official apologies, public inquiries and commemorations, Winter argues that it is important to study monetary redress in depth. The book’s overarching aim is “to better understand monetary redress so as to help policymakers design better programmes” (7).
Many researchers have problematized redress programmes, and Winter has previously voiced concern that scholars’ tendency to focus on failures might discourage policy makers from setting up redress programmes.1 This book starts with the statement that there is no such thing as a perfect redress programme. While the author identifies many inherent dilemmas, he also formulates pragmatic recommendations about how to handle them.
A fundamental question is which normative framework to use when determining quality in redress programmes. In Part I, the Van Boven/Bassiouni Basic Principles are taken as a point of departure to discuss what full compensation to survivors could mean, but it is not the only reference, since Winter insists that an analysis of monetary redress programmes must also take state interests into account. That may include creating predictable, efficient programmes, that stay within budgetary frameworks.
Part II of the book is dedicated to qualitative studies of ten large redress programmes with more than 500 applicants. Several have been in place in Ireland: The Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB), providing redress for people placed in industrial schools, a redress program for unwed mothers who worked in the Magdalene Laundries, and Caranua that offered in-kind compensation to the latter group. The Australian examples are regional programmes: Queensland’s Forde Foundation, Queensland Redress and Redress Western Australia. All three Canadian examples came about after the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2006: The Common Experience Payment (CEP), The Personal Credits
Payment (providing redress in-kind), and the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) which is the biggest and most expensive programme discussed in the book. A separate chapter deals with the Historic Claims Process (HCP), active 2006–2017 in Aotearoa New Zealand. These examples are not presented as classic case studies but as exemplar programmes, scrutinised to make general recommendations. In addition to written documentation about the programmes, the analysis builds on 63 interviews with public officials who have developed and implemented the programmes, representatives of survivor groups and representatives of community agencies providing services to survivors.
Monetary redress for care injuries raises a whole range of difficult questions: who should be eligible, what injuries to compensate for, how much to pay, etcetera. Winter’s main argument in Part III – where the policy recommendations are presented in thematically organized chapters – is that redress programmes need to be flexible and provide several different pathways to redress. Survivors should be able to choose a base-level payment that demands as little documentation as possible, to avoid retraumatization and safeguard their integrity, but it should also be possible to aim for full compensation for the injuries in a more complex and time-consuming application process. Regardless of the issue at hand, Winter states,
survivors should have a say in how these programmes are designed.
An important point made in the book is that in addition to compensating for ”interactional injurious acts”, such as sexual abuse, good programmes should redress ”structural injuries”, for example neglect, malnutrition and forced labour (150). This is related to the thorny issue of whether actions that were permitted at the time when they took place, but are considered reprehensible today, should be redressed. The regulation of corporal punishment has changed considerably during the last century, to give but one example. Winter rightly points out that references to contemporary standards are sometimes used to limit state responsibility, and argues forcefully that “the fact that care providers were permitted to injure young people is a salient feature of systematically injurious care practices” (153). He goes on to suggest that it is easy to distinguish between “injuries of forced labour and isolation, and other permitted wrongdoings”, that should be eligible for redress, and “examples of contemporary practices that are not wrong in themselves”, like low education standards, which should not be eligible (152). I would, however, have wished for a more thorough discussion of this topic in dialogue with the literature on historical responsibility. On a practical note, to make such distinctions in hindsight policy makers would need access to historical research about care institutions that is not always available. As Winter mentions, care history is difficult to write. Records are often lacking, and when they exist, they might not answer the questions raised in redress processes since they were produced for other purposes.
Large redress programmes necessarily entail a bureaucratization of redress. Winter discusses pros and cons with different methods to ensure that the assessment of applications is fair, efficient and transparent, like creating categories and using a matrix. This is a good example of the broad scope of this book; it ranges from overarching discussions about how to conceptualize full compensation for injuries during institutional care, to seemingly mundane details that greatly influence the symbolic function of redress programmes. For example, the author draws attention to the labelling of categories. Calling the least severe level of abuse “moderate” might undermine the ambition to acknowledge the suffering of victims. How to set deadlines is another important issue. Redress programmes need to be predictable for the state, Winter argues, but at the same time previous research based on interviews with survivors show that to apply for compensation could be a lengthy process filled with ambivalence. 2 The solution suggested in this book is to design two-phase programmes from the beginning, rather than closing and re-opening the programme.
There are innumerable examples of people who have spoken out about abuse while in care, but who were not believed or even punished for doing so. Survivors might have good reasons to mistrust the state and its representatives, and hence when designing redress programmes this must be considered. Winter emphasizes the importance of support throughout the whole process and gives examples of how this is best done by local civil society organizations, funded by the government. I couldn’t agree more that such support needs to be an integral part of redress. To ensure that applicants are treated respectfully, though, civil society organizations that have previously provided out-of-home care need to grapple with their own institutional histories and educate their staff. 3
Throughout the book, the author often argues that a particular recommendation is good for both states and survivors. Given the aim of this study, it is of course essential to present best practices in a way that is convincing to politicians and state officials. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the actors involved in redress processes have very different capacities, which might become even more visible in analyses of how applications are adjudicated once a programme is in place – a type of study that is less common than studies based on interviews with policy makers and/or survivors. 4
Overall, this well-written book gives a good overview of monetary redress for researchers who want to conduct empirical studies of this field of public policy, regardless of whether the focus is on the design of redress programmes or their practical implementation. Its most significant contribution is that straightforward discussion of inevitable trade-offs is successfully combined with practical recommendations about how to handle them in the form of bullet point lists. It will prove useful for policy makers but is also a resource for survivors making claims for compensation.
Malin Arvidsson, Linköping University
1 http://historicaldialogues.org/2023/04/05/book-review-odonnell-orourke-and-smith-eds-redress-irelands-institutions-and-transitional-justice/.
2 Ingunn Studsrød & Elisabeth Enoksen, “’But then again, in the end, I decided to apply for redress’: stories of ambivalence from survivors of institutional abuse”, Nordic Social Work Research, 14:3 (2022): 108–120, https://doi.org/10.1080/2156857X.2022.2155217.
3 David McGinniss, Keir Reeves & Frank Golding (23 Feb 2024), ”Whose pain? Whose shame? Integrating heritage and histories in Ballarat, Australia, International Journal of Heritage Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2024.2320319.
4 Johanna Sköld, Bengt Sandin & Johanna Schiratzki, ”Redressing or Excusing the Past? The Evaluation of Sexual Child Abuse in the Swedish Redress Scheme for Historical Abuse in Out-of-Home Care”, in Johanna Annola, Hanna Lindberg & Pirjo Markkola (eds.) Lived Institutions as History of Experience, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.